9. 'Community'

In which a sitcom about a misfit study group of community-college students has a backstory at least as dysfunctional and improbable as any of its characters'. Mercurial showrunner Dan Harmon created a mammoth network cult-comedy phenomenon, and had snatched it from the jaws of defeat time and time again, weathering cast departures, his own firing, even the show's cancellation by NBC. (It's now going into production with Yahoo, unintentionally mirroring the boom in online universities, or something.) Its core contention that school is a place where broken people can start the hard work of repairing themselves never gets lost in the paintball splatter.